PLATFORM : Scouts Stand Up

August 30, 1992| KEN McPHERSON, co-founder of Forgotten Scouts, said the nationwide group of gays who are former Boy Scouts plans to pressure businesses to stop donating money to Scouting because of its anti-gay policies. He told The Times:

There is a political issue before the American public right now: Is sexual orientation equivalent to gender, race or religion in terms of those statuses that society should protect?

The issue is not whether gay people should be in Scouting. We'll always be in Scouting. We always have been. They have no right to tell us that we should somehow be separated from an organization that we helped create. We have literally hundreds of Eagle Scouts in our organization.

We will stand up to those institutions that support discrimination and say: We will not support you.

Whether it's the military, whether it's the Boy Scouts, whether it's the platform of the Republican Party, we will challenge all of them. We are done with the era when you could gay-bash and get away with it.

Society needs to learn about who lesbian and gay people are and judge us by the content of our characters, not by the myths and superstitions of bigots.